


Something Different

by pumpkinonwheels



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: F/M, light angst from a simpler time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-29
Updated: 2015-03-29
Packaged: 2018-03-20 03:33:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3635058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pumpkinonwheels/pseuds/pumpkinonwheels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A ficlet I wrote post-3x01 that I somehow never posted! </p><p>After the hospital, Oliver needs something to be different. He needs something he can point to as tangibly changed. So he takes out his phone and considers Felicity's picture.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something Different

**Author's Note:**

> I was going through some old files and found this little fic I'd written but never posted. Given all the MEGA-ANGST we've been dealing with lately (not that I'm complaining), I thought it might be nice to share this. :)

Oliver knew it wouldn’t make a difference. It wouldn’t make this easier, or scrub away his doubts. But he needed this change to actually _change_ something.

So he opened his phone’s photo album and scrolled through. He almost never took pictures. Not because he disliked them; he appreciated how simple it was to capture memories as they happened—in principle anyway. It just rarely occurred to him to take any.

There were some of Thea. Some of Mom. (He thumbed across those almost before they fully loaded.) He had to flip back a year to find one of Felicity, and she’d taken that one herself.

He’d misplaced his phone one day, so she’d called it. It was under some papers on her desk. She dug through and found it, then stared at the screen.

“Why is my face a nothing-face?” she asked.

He took the phone. “What?”

“My face!” She pointed at the screen, still lit with her name. “I have no face. A nothing-face.”

“It’s not a nothing-face. It’s just…blank.”

“But _why_ is it blank?”

It felt like a trick question. “Because I don’t have a photo of you?”

She snatched the phone from him and snapped the picture. “There. Now you do.”

He’d loaded it as her contact photo that day. It hadn’t changed since.

Something needed to change now. Something tangible.

He’d been so sure in the hospital. Of course the conversation would be hard—one of the hardest things he’d done, in fact—but Oliver Queen was nothing if not familiar with doing the hard thing when it was also the _right_ thing. But he hadn’t thought about after. About sitting in the dark foundry on this mattress Felicity bought him, staring at the fern she’d chosen to brighten the place up, to brighten him up.

He hadn’t thought about seeing her every day. Chasing bad guys with her in his ear.  Trying not to stare at her mouth when she rambled about tech stuff. Clenching his fist rather than touch her shoulder, her arm, her face.

Pretending he was okay. Watching her do the same. Both of them acting as though nothing had changed—which was technically true; they were still friends, still partners. But they knew now that they could have been something else, too. Except they couldn’t. _He_ couldn’t. 

He almost wished they’d fought more, longer, harder. He wished she’d slapped him, or punched him the way Sara taught her: hard and precise. He wanted a black eye or a broken rib. Something he could point to as a result of his choice. Something altered, if not between them then within him. 

But he had nothing. Just this ache that dulled and spiked depending on her nearness.

It was dull now, alone in the foundry, but it stirred again when her face appeared on his phone’s screen. Ponytail, pink lipstick, glasses, blue eyes. _Just a face_ , he thought. _Nothing remarkable._ But her eyes were focused just off-screen, behind the camera, on him, and her smile was teasing and bright. A simple moment captured without thought.

His thumb hovered over the delete icon. He needed something to be different. Something besides the tightness in his throat and Felicity’s smaller smiles and the dense air that always settled between them now.

Something besides the doubt thrumming through him as steadily as his pulse.

He threw the phone down and dropped his head into his hands. He couldn’t delete even a picture of her. He wouldn’t. Not now. Maybe not ever.

 _Not now_ , he’d said in the hospital. _Maybe not ever_.

Maybe wasn’t enough for Felicity, and he understood. But maybe was all he had holding him together.

Well, that and a picture. A memory in pixels, and (if he was very, very lucky) maybe a glimpse of the future, too.


End file.
